Mirror Master
33 years ago - Evan McCulloch is left on the doorstep of an Scotish orphanage.
20 years ago - 13-year-old Evan runs away, living as a thief and street thug.
14 years ago - 19-year-old Evan fulfills his first contract kill.
11 years ago - 22-year-old Evan finds the stored equipment of Sam Scudder.
10 years ago - 23-year-old Evan takes a contract on Animal Man's life. Buddy convinces him that he's wasting his talent as an assassin & that he could "do great things". He moves to Keystone City to become the new Mirror Master, confronting The Flash & Kid Flash.
8 years ago - 25-year-old Evan joins the Rogues.
7 years ago - 26-year-old Evan is caught & sent to prison by Wally West when he ends Barry Allen's ideal with the Rogues, holding them responsible for the fall of Frankie Kane.
5 years ago - 28-year-old Evan escapes the Suicide Squad after Rick Flagg's death. He rejoins the Rogues.
3 years ago - 30-year-old Evan joins Lex Luthor's Injustice Gang in a bid to defeat Wally West along with the Watchtower. Later he joins the original Rogues in stopping Clifford Devoe's new, more lethal team of Rogues, earning a new deal with Wally West.
The Silver Age versions of the Flash rogues gallery were almost all drawn from the same archetype; a criminal who "invented a device' that allowed them to somehow completely violate the fundamental laws of physics. Within that context, a burglar that invents a way to manipulate light with mirrors to the point where he was flat-out warping reality wasn't that much of a stretch. One of the main things we find ourselves doing with every classic member of the Rogues is struggling to explain just what the hell is going on. Thankfully, with the second Mirror Master Evan McCulloch, a lot of the heavy lifting had already been done.
Mirror Master's Comic HistoryEvan McCulloch appeared for the first time in 1989 in the pages of Animal Man. This was one several amazing series that grew out of the penchant to give obscure little-known characters to unknown British writers, the same practice that gave us Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, & Peter Milligan's Shade the Changing Man. In this case, Animal Man was being written by Grant Morrison, who of course would go on to revolutionize the Justice League, recreate the X-Men for the new millennium, and tie knots in Batman's mythology that we're still trying to figure out.
While the practice of updating and modernizing Flash villains would become more normalized a year later when Mark Waid took over writing his book, this was the first time we had seen anyone do it. This was a decidedly Grant Morrison take on the practice, simply taking the equipment of the original Mirror Master and giving it to an Scotish-born street thug & assassin. It wasn't a complex character shift, but it was an effective one. Even now, when the modern Rogues are all together, McCulloch continues to feel just a little more dangerous than everyone else. The innovation behind his reinvention was to take those powers and give them to someone who presented a real threat. |
Our Mirror Master StoryMcCulloch fit very neatly into our timeline. We introduced him in much the same way, starting with him finding the Mirror Master technology and choosing to adopt the identity for himself, and taking a job to kill Buddy Baker before he abandons it to go on to bigger things.
We decided to make him an early member of the Suicide Squad. there is some precedent for this, as there are very few noteworthy villains in DC who HAVEN'T been associated with the Suicide Squad at one time or another, but in his case he just seems to work particularly well in the group. Of course, fellow Rogue Captain Boomerang is a seminal member of that team. We don't mean to be continually reaching into the grab-bag of Flash villains for the Squad, but the fact is they're one of the best and most iconic group of bad guys outside of Gotham. He's one of the two characters to actually escape the early version of the League. Merlyn loses an arm to the Squad's explosive armband, but of course if anyone can escape from an explosion unscathed, it's McCulloch. Mirror Master isn't necessarily the highest profile Flash villan, that title is probably held by Captain Cold, Reverse Flash, or Grodd, but he's often the one that is often thought of as the most Flash villain-y Flash villan, with his completely bananas physics-defying powers actually manifesting in a very fun way, making him one of the best characters to represent the Rogues in the broader world. |